


You Love a Stone

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: (Gotta Die so they can Live Again), (It's a Reincarnation AU - of course there's Major Character Death), Alternate Universe - Alternative Care Institution, Alternate Universe - Edo Period, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, GaaLee Fest 2019, M/M, See chapter notes for trigger warnings, Temporary Character Death, lots of background relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 16:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20410525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Suppose the universe gave you a second chance to be with your true love. Suppose it gave you a third chance, too.Written for the GaaLee Summertime of Love Fest 2019, Day 9: Reincarnation





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song [A Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me9MAS6ShMQ) by the incomparable Okkervil River. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to my beautiful wife and beta [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for soothing my anxiety about writing angst. 
> 
> Also check out the rest of the [Summertime of Love Fest](https://puregaalee.tumblr.com/post/184654222850/gaalee-festival-2019every-way-i-could-love-you) on Tumblr or search #gaaleefest19!

**I.**

_Hot breath, rough skin, warm laughs and smiling - the loveliest words, whispered and meant - you like all these things. But though you like all these things, you love a stone._

* * *

After the war, there is a shattering. The glass dome, under which Gaara united the Shinobi Nations, starts to show its cracks.

After the war, Lee is dispatched to Suna. 

The Five Great Nations are rebuilding, and despite the bonds forged on the battlefield, no nation quite trusts the others yet. A decision is made, in council rooms and whispers that Lee is not privy to, to send a few shinobi from each nation to each of the others - a sign of allegiance, he’s told. A sign that each of the other nations can be trusted. 

Lee doesn’t think much of it. 

Mostly, he thinks of Tenten, far away from home in the frosty mountains of Kumo, wiping frozen tears from the corners of glassy eyes, onto the black sleeves she hasn’t stopped wearing since … _since_\- 

Lee still has a hard time thinking the words. 

He thinks, too, of Temari, his direct counterpart, on her way to Konoha. He pictures her whipcrack-sharp smile, her eyes that wavered between eagerness and indecision when they encountered each other by chance on their way across the desert, just long enough for a meal across a shared campfire. He thinks about her head thrown back when she laughed, the firelight dancing on her throat when he told her Shikamaru was coordinating the relief effort. 

The war had a different effect on each of them, he supposes.

Suna’s jounin barracks are overflowing with foreign shinobi, so Lee finds himself sharing a room with a genjutsu specialist from Kiri and a weapons master from Iwa. If it weren’t for the way Yatsuba’s sharpened teeth glint when he weaves his handsigns or the way Tsuchiro’s nunchaku ring like cracking geodes when he swings them, their camaraderie would almost feel familiar. 

The work of rebuilding Suna is thankless, unforgiving. Suna’s infrastructure was far from destroyed by the war, but the buildings that have been damaged must be rebuilt to exacting standards - to protect their occupants from sandstorms and the harsh eventualities of the desert. 

Gaara is there, too, overseeing their work more often than Lee is quite comfortable with. He follows behind their crew with impressive maelstroms of sand and wind, to ensure that what they’ve built is sound. 

For someone so powerful, Gaara conceals his presence well. He moves almost silently in the sand. More than once, he slips up behind Lee and has a hand on his shoulder before Lee can think to react, hot breath in Lee’s ear. Gaara’s hand is warmer than all the desert sun’s heat. He only ever murmurs a gentle correction or points out a flaw in Lee’s technique. Lee excuses the shiver that runs down his spine as surprise. 

Suna’s shinobi are slow to warm up to outsiders, sharp as cactus thorns and cautious as desert foxes in their burrows. They’re all the more reticent to accept someone like Lee, with his bombastic voice and grinning thumbs-ups and bright orange legwarmers. 

Their acceptance matters little, in the end, so Lee throws himself doggedly into his work, giving his all for the sake of peace. This, more than anything, is what finally endears him to his newfound allies.

_He may be crazy,_ they whisper behind their hands, _but no one works as hard or as long as he does._

Meanwhile, Lee delights in the snatches of foreign culture he takes in - chances he’s rarely had available on missions, always so focused on his assigned objective and his ninja way. He partakes joyfully of Suna’s sweet teas and pastries, their spiced dried meats, their intricately woven fabrics, light as air but resistant to the desert’s heat. 

Best of all, though, are the evenings he spends with Gaara. 

He meets him by chance, one night out running laps in the sand wastes that surround the village. There’s a hunched figure in the distance in a thatch of creosote - Lee slows to a jog and the shape resolves itself into the body of his friend. 

Lee is surprised to see Gaara so far from the village walls so late at night, but Gaara’s expression doesn’t look taken aback at all.

“I know everything that happens in my desert,” he says, in lieu of a greeting. 

Rather than question it, Lee invites Gaara to train with him. He expects to be turned down - the Kazekage must have official duties carrying him out into the wastes this time of night, after all - but he’s delighted when Gaara agrees.

They spar, hand meeting hand in a flurry of punches and kicks and body blows. Lee’s body burns with an exhilaration he hasn’t felt since before the war. Gaara’s taijutsu has improved, but he remains no match for Lee in a purely physical bout. When the sand finally gets involved, Lee’s heart flutters. 

Afterwards, they collapse side-by-side on a patch of bare ground. Gaara’s sand heaves with him as he breathes hard, body hunched and animal. Sweat glistens like pearls on his hairline in the moonlight. 

Lee turns to look at him and his pupils blow wide, capturing every last shining photon in the chill desert night. 

It happens again and again, first by accident, later by design. At least a few nights per week, as long as Lee can spare the sleep and Gaara can spare the time. They fight often, but not always. Sometimes they merely sit shoulder to shoulder, blanketed by Gaara’s sand or sharing thermoses of hot tea passed from hand to icy hand. 

Their conversations, unconstrained by sight and sunshine, are rambling, sprawling, tangential … almost idealistic. Gaara makes Lee laugh like a young child, head lolling on his neck and body quaking. 

Sometimes, Lee swears he sees Gaara smile too.

* * *

Rebuilding a village from the ground up is a challenge. 

Not the streets, the shops, the buildings, the many permits and sheafs of parchment and endless layers of bureaucracy; but restoring the trust of the citizenry in their leadership and in each other. Fortunately Suna was spared the worst of it - Gaara throwing first his power and then his body upon the apparatus - but sometimes he still sees flickers of mistrust behind his villagers’ dark and shaded eyes. Warding signs flash in his wake: protection against the demon’s gold-flecked eye.

It matters not at all. He would protect them all with his life a million times more regardless. 

His head spins with the interminable proceedings of council meetings, each clan and tribe wanting their own piece of the puzzle guaranteed. He entertains an endless bevy of supplicants and requestors, striking through the red tape with a nib of a pen sharper than a kunai, stamping approvals with a fury that would cow a lesser man, until his pad of red ink turns the brown of dried blood. 

Gaara has never had use for weapons, but he soon finds that it’s true what they say: the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. 

He’s lucky to have his brother at his side throughout, sparks of levity in between endless drudgery. Although he doesn’t understand most of Kankuro’s jokes, his smile and encouraging elbow (no longer blocked by the sand armor, these days) is enough to bring Gaara a fragment of peace and tranquility. 

He misses his sister like a limb, his right arm intact but his left hanging ragged, unmended. But he saw the way her eyes flashed bright with hope when he sent her off to Konoha, and does not regret his choice to delegate her there. There are few kunoichi as whip-sharp as Temari; she and the Leaf shinobi deserve each other. Gaara is not so ignorant of bonds and romance as he sometimes pretends, and being underestimated can be an advantage in politics as well as battle. Still, he played the fool when she asked him, “Really?” with a smirk playing around her lips. 

Supervising the reconstruction from the ground is a brief reprieve. A breath of warm, dust-caked air, sand and sweat and chakra curling in the sunlight. And in between the many foreign faces - shinobi he’s met just once, spied from across the battlefield - there’s the pulse of a familiar chakra signature: Rock Lee. 

Gaara doesn’t mean to startle him at first, but then he does. The look of surprise fading to joy on Lee’s face is a treasure Gaara cradles to his chest in quiet moments, so different from the reactions of his youth: shock that once transformed to abject terror. 

At night, he goes out into the desert to clear his head. He doesn’t mean to find Lee there, until he does. 

Lee’s movements are fluid, steady like the torrents that flow in and out of the underwater caves on the coast of Wind Country. Gaara lurches, jars left and right, dodges down and into the sand, motions brittle as the cracked bedrock. Rough skin brushes skin long untouched, leaves bruises that Gaara presses his thumbs into during long meetings, hoping that they’ll linger. 

On the nights they don’t fight, Gaara stares into the night sky reflected in Lee’s dark eyes, an entire galaxy sprawling in his pupils. He listens to Lee’s tone as much as his words, speaks sparingly, touches often. His motions color with an uncharacteristic, meaningful hesitation. 

He arrives earlier, leaves later. Sometimes he doesn’t depart until the sun is rising over the crest of a sand dune, the desert dappled pink and brown. Sometimes he spends the whole night awake with Lee and wakes later, face-down on his desk, hair matted on one side of his head. Sometimes he picks flecks of salt from the hems of his trousers, unsure of their provenance; later his sand whispers to him of drops of sweat long-dried in the desert’s heat, humming with the dehydrated passion of exertion. 

Sometimes when he sleeps, he dreams of all the ways that Lee could die. 

Sometimes when he sleeps, he dreams of a man on fire, a man who punched a meteor apart, a man promising to defend him to the death. It would have been laughable, once, the idea of anyone protecting Gaara of the Desert, the man with the Ultimate Defense. But when Lee swore to protect him, during the war, no flicker of a smile crossed his drawn and stoic countenance. 

He dreams of that familiar face: Lee, backlit by blue sky and golden sun, the high arch of his cheekbone that Gaara aches to touch, the jut of his Adam’s apple that Gaara longs to bite, his face in profile: strong jaw and a distinguished brow. These thoughts are new, unfamiliar, sour like a pickled plum.

It vexes him.

* * *

One night, Lee returns to the jounin barracks early. 

He eases the door open and catches his roommates in an intimate embrace. Yatsuba and Tsuchiro are sprawled atop each other in Yatsuba’s bed, the one closest to the window, their bodies concealed under the thin sheet but their faces touching. The room is warm with body heat, the smell within unmistakable. Tsuchiro gasps. Yatsuba shifts and gives a low groan, biting into Tsuchiro’s shoulder with his sharpened teeth. Spots of dark blood stain the pillowcase. 

Lee’s face floods with heat. 

They don’t turn around or seem to notice him, so he closes the door silently and departs into the desert on swift feet. 

After all, he thinks, peace means new alliances, new relationships. 

He sits atop a sandstone spire, his legs dangling down into empty air, and waits for Gaara there. He arrives as if summoned by messenger bird, just as Lee is thinking of him, his sandals crunching when he touches down. Wind whistles through the canyonlands. 

Lee silently follows the white of Gaara’s sash down, down, until they’re on level ground. 

From the look on Gaara’s face, Lee knows they will not spar tonight. 

Instead, they sit next to one another in the sand. The grains dig pinprick divots in Lee’s unbandaged palms. He looks up at the sky, a vast wash of indigo split with a ribbon of milky stars.

“Are you all right?” Gaara asks, after an age. “Your eyes are wet.”

“Just homesick, I guess.” Lee buries his hands in the sand, scoops up a handful, lets it fall between his spread fingers with a whisper. “I miss the river most of all.” 

Gaara’s nostrils flare. When he speaks, his voice is barely a whisper. 

“I can’t give you that, but- ” 

Gaara touches the tips of his fingers to the sand beneath them. The motion spreads out from his fingertips in concentric ripples. As Lee watches, mouth open, flecks of mica dance to the surface of the desert until they seem to be sitting in the middle of a shimmering lake. 

“I think I’m in love with you,” Lee blurts. Shakes his head, tries again. “_I’m in love with you._” 

When he turns, Gaara’s jade eyes are wide, but he hasn’t moved away. 

They share a single, stolen kiss. Sand sticks to Lee’s bare palms, the knees of his uniform. Gaara tastes like how longing feels, like the dust from the pages of an old but well-loved book, like the last sip of water in an empty canteen. 

They separate to breathe, mouths and eyes wet. Lee reaches out to cup Gaara’s cheek, to draw him in again. 

Gaara pulls away. 

Lee’s hand closes on empty air. 

“This won’t work.” Specks of mica glimmer in Gaara’s tear tracks like an accusation. 

He has a list of excuses a mile long. It will be too complex, too thorny; it puts Suna at risk; the Council would never allow it; the citizens wouldn’t accept it; he has to prioritize his sister and her burgeoning romance with that Leaf jounin. 

“What if-” Lee starts, voice pleading. 

“No.” Gaara stills his mouth with one hand. “I’ve considered every eventuality.”

“But that means you also-”

“Yes.”

“Then isn’t it worth trying?” Lee would get down on his hands and knees and beg if he thought it would help. 

Silence. 

“You’re not the person I thought you were.” A whisper, quickly taken by the harsh wind. 

“I know.”

Nobody questions it when Lee asks to be reassigned to Konoha. 

On his way back, he meets Tenten in the woods on the border of Fire Country. Her eyes are still red, her black garments shrunk down to a single dark armband. _I guess this is it,_ he thinks. 

They come together as naturally as breathing underwater. 

Three years later, she proposes. She doesn’t give him a ring.

“But what about Neji?” he asks.

“Neji is dead, Lee.”

In the long, dark silence on the bank of the river, he sighs. 

“I will think about it.”

Two days later, he says yes.

“You’ve always wanted a child.”

Tenten laughs bitterly. “There are many things I’ve wanted.”

“Can you have any of them?”

There’s no response. It feels as though he sighs more often than he breathes, now. 

“At least I can give you this,” he says. “We could be happy.” 

They aren’t happy, but they are … content. There are times Lee looks at his wife - just after he’s made her laugh aloud, or when she’s holding their infant son, bathed in the warm yellow light of their shared kitchen - and he thinks, _I could have loved her_.

They never visit Neji’s grave together. Neither of them wants to overhear what the other has to say. 

The times Lee is dispatched to Wind Country, he spends the nights sleepless. Marriage, for all its faults, is still sacred to him, and he won’t betray Gai-sensei’s teachings. Loyalty to your comrades above all. 

But sometimes he finds himself out in the wastes and feels eyes on the back of his neck. 

Those nights, Lee wrings out every last moment from the stained fabric of his time with Gaara. Mostly, they spar. They don’t talk about it. They don’t kiss. They pour out their feelings into the movements of their bodies. (Though sometimes it’s a near thing: a hold transforms into an embrace, a grapple becomes shared breath.) 

When Lee returns from missions, there are always fresh lilies on the white-veined stone bearing Neji’s name.

He teaches his son about his long-gone teammate, introduces him to the Hyuuga clan, calls him _your Uncle Neji_, just as he calls all their friends. If there is one joy in his life, it’s watching his son grow up: the spitting image of him, right down to the green jumpsuit. He watches Metal pushing Gai-sensei’s wheelchair around the village and wipes a tear from his eye. 

Tenten’s weapon shop doesn’t do such good business these days, but they get by. Lee takes on more missions, and Metal’s genin salary helps. Gai-sensei moves to the old Hatake compound, where the Sixth retired, and they visit them and their pack of baying ninja hounds every Sunday like clockwork. Lee spends his free time training and penning letters that never quite make it to the aviary. 

If, on cold nights, the icy hand of guilt grips his throat; if he’s a bit too excited during the Kage summits; if he has a hidden drawer in his desk stuffed full with unsent scrolls - nobody but Tenten seems to notice (although she, too, pretends she doesn’t). 

_It’s enough,_ he thinks. _It has to be enough._

* * *

The day of his engagement, Gaara walks into the Council chambers on brittle legs. Within, he already knows, are three princesses from the outlying tribes, hand-selected by the Council for the purity of their lineage and the beneficence of their families. 

When the door creaks open, he hardly notices they’re in the room. Their chakra signatures are weak; they pose no threat to him. He recalls, for a moment, the overwhelming impact of Lee’s massive chakra the first time they met in battle, the memory bitter in his mouth. Not one of these women so much as radiates killing intent; none of them could kill nor defend him. Whoever his wife is to be, he will always have to protect her. 

He has already protected so many things: his village, his sister, his citizens, the shinobi under his command. 

Perhaps it would not be so difficult, he thinks, to protect one more thing.

He picks one almost at random, or so he tells himself. His bride-to-be is sullen, soft-spoken, with light hair and light eyes. (In truth, he selects the one who least reminds him of the name that sticks in the back of his throat.) “A perfect match!” the village matchmaker announces. “Fated by the stars!”

Gaara never put much stock in fortune-telling. 

A few months later, the whole village attends his wedding. There’s a feast that Gaara tastes none of, a ceremony that he hears none of, hands clasped in hands that he hardly even feels. He watches, as if from above his body, the procession of civilians from his and other villages traveling past him in the reception line. 

His brother stands, as always, at his back. His sister is off scolding her child and upbraiding her lazy husband. Naruto has been drunk since long before the ceremony began and wobbles unsteadily, then belches during his speech. 

There is only one guest that Gaara cares to see. 

Lee approaches him with a funereal expression on his face. Tenten clings to his elbow and his son, a chuunin now, walks behind. (Metal looks just like Lee used to. The reminder of that young face sticks in Gaara’s teeth like a burr.) Lee congratulates him with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

Gaara can’t bring himself to mutter so much as a ‘thank you’. He nods and lays his hand on Lee’s shoulder as if to say ‘goodbye’. His new wife, at least, is gracious to them in her own quiet, retiring way. 

Gaara follows Lee’s retreating back with a look that says _for now_, and _maybe later_, and _soon_.

He doesn’t know that it will be the last time he sees Lee. 

When he receives word that Lee has died (heroically, in battle, the way Gaara always knew he would), Gaara doesn’t go to the funeral. He sends a messenger bird to Lee’s widow and grieving son with his condolences, marked _From the office of the Kazekage_.

Then he goes out into the desert and levels a mesa into a plain of glass. 

Flecks of quartz and mica spin up around him in a fragile, shivering tornado. He roars and misses, for the first time, the tailed beast that used to dwell inside him. Then he would have an excuse for letting his old self come out, raw-edged and red-eyed.

He makes a boulder of sand and dashes it into the earth. The ground shatters. 

When he comes home that night, his princess is waiting for him with a knowing look in her eyes. 

Later, the people of Wind Country whisper about the overnight formation of the Crystal Crater. The tribespeople blame it on an errant Wind Spirit; the shinobi blame it on a rogue ninja. 

Gaara goes out to inspect it himself, as if it were the first time. When he peers down inside, he sees his own face fractured and refracted back. In the center of the desert’s newest gaping wound, he swears he sees his own broken heart. 

Years on, Gaara is revered as the protector of his village, a hero, the champion that Suna so desperately needed. He closes the village’s orphanages and starts a foster program; he breaks ground on a new taijutsu school; he revolutionizes Suna’s agriculture. 

After his early retirement, he adopts as many war orphans as can fit in the Kazekage manor, so his home is always full of sound and joy. 

On the day he dies (peacefully, surrounded by his children, in the sleep he so well deserves), his wife finds a photograph in the desk in his study. Its edges are worn blunt by clutching fingers, the back stained with saltwater. In it, Gaara has his arm around some shinobi she hardly recognizes. There’s a smile on his face like none she’s ever seen her husband wear - soft, hopeful. 

She can’t bear to look at it, so when they burn his body, she throws it on the pyre and lets it turn to ash with him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings this chapter for the on-screen suicide of a major character, infidelity, and background characters engaged in sex work. There is also a brief, non-explicit reference to the practice of _nanshoku_, which is regarded in culturally and period-relevant perspective. Please proceed with caution.
> 
> I did a _lot_ of research for this chapter, but please note that not all of the content is completely period-accurate, nor is it intended to be. I had to handwave a few Shinto customs (such as Edo period marriage customs) and pull from slightly before or slightly after the correct era in for narrative effect. Please don't take anything in here as being an accurate representation of Shinto belief systems or Edo-period culture.

**II.**

_And I think I believe that if stones could dream, they’d dream of being laid side-by-side, piece-by-piece, and turned into a castle for some towering queen they’re unable to know. And when that queen’s daughter came of age, well I think she’d be lovely, and stubborn, and brave, and suitors would journey from kingdoms away just to make themselves known. _

__

__

_(And I think that I know the bitter dismay of the lover who brought fresh bouquets every day, but she turned him away to remember some knave, who once gave just one rose, one day years ago.)_

* * *

“Some samurai will be passing through the village later today,” Neji says as he sets a bag of buckwheat flour on the doorstep of the shrine office. “One of the merchants passed them on his way into town.”

Lee hefts the bag inside. Although he keeps a straight face, his body thrills. Lee has always been fascinated by samurai - the warrior-poets, learned yet fierce, elegant yet imposing. Sometimes he likes to think, had he been born in another time, that he might have fought alongside them. And then, of course, there are the stories about their training - Lee thinks he would have liked that (been _good_ at it, even, in a way that he has never quite been good at service to the gods or household tasks), to be someone’s _beloved retainer_. It’s not that he’s wholly inexperienced, either - the women who run the pleasure quarters at the center of the village are always coaxing him in, offers of dances on their safflower-red lips - but he knows what shapes he thinks of late at night.

In peacetime, however, there’s much more need for men of god than men of war. 

“I’ll be sure to stop by this afternoon. I hope to see them!” Lee says. 

Neji mutters an assent, gruffs his goodbyes, rinses his hands and mouth and claps and bows a thank-you to the shrine’s god. 

“Tell Tenten I said hello!” Lee reminds him on his way down the cobbled path. 

Neji nods his agreement and gives a quick farewell bow. 

The day stretches before Lee, busy in the bright autumn sun, everything sunburnt orange and umber brown beyond the evergreen shelter of the shrine’s grounds. 

He has much to do. Maki-san’s daughter has recently given birth and needs a ceremony for her darling newborn son (red-faced, with chubby hands still too weak to grasp his mother’s fingers). Kaizawa-san is breaking ground on a new storehouse and needs it blessed before winter comes. And down past the inn, it’s been one year since Haruno-san’s father died, and Yamanaka-san has asked him to come bless the man’s altar, tucked away in the corner of Haruno’s lush boudoir in the pleasure quarters. 

Still, he’s able to complete his tasks before lunchtime. The clack of his wooden sandals follows him down the flagstone streets. 

He arrives at Neji’s noodle cart to find the main thoroughfare of the village all a-clatter, bustling with merchants and housewives on errands, buzzing with an excitement generally only seen on festival days. 

“Just in time,” Tenten remarks, and passes him a bowl of warm udon and chopsticks. He accepts it from her gratefully and scarfs it down, peering over the cart handles down the cobbled path that marks the entrance to the village. “I heard they should be here any minute.”

As always, the main currency in the village is gossip - stories and rumors passed lightning-quick behind cupped hands and between pursed lips. As the priest, Lee is generally privy to it all, but there’s nowhere better to get up-to-the-minute information than in the heart of the village itself. 

Tenten has barely concluded her sentence when the telltale fall of hoofbeats reaches Lee’s ears. 

“Here they come,” Lee whispers, leaning over the cart handles. His knuckles crack loud on the varnish.

“Don’t grab so hard,” Neji scolds him, rapping the backs of Lee’s fingers with a swat of his own chopsticks, “you’ll dent the wood.”

Lee eases his grasp, but his eyes don’t stray from the head of the path.

Finally, they emerge from the mist and shadows, burnished copper in the sun parting the leaves, as if they were stepping from between smoke and flame: the samurai. Lee barely contains a gasp. A forgotten strand of udon hangs from his slack lips. 

Lee has always had dreams of flying, dreams where his feet left the ground and carried him through the air, dreams where he sailed over a bone-scattered battlefield on a cloud of earth, dreams where he hovered above the center of a pond made from glittering glass. When he was young, his mother would say it was because he was touched by the gods. The dreams have always struck Lee as more fantasy than prophecy. But the weightless, gracious sensation in his stomach is almost like how he dreams flying would feel. 

His eye takes in every detail of the approaching warriors: the fine, thick fabric of their clothing; the wide, flat pleats of their _hakama_ pants; the low, sturdy gait of their mounts, ruddy coats well-brushed and shining. And there, on either hip of the man leading the whole coterie: two wickedly sharp swords - one long, one short - their handles inlaid with delicately carved ivory in the shape of lotus flowers. Lee looks up at the man’s face as he passes, but the low brim of his traveling hat shadows his eyes. 

“Do you know why they came?” Lee whispers out of the corner of his mouth, as if his awe would disturb their procession.

“I heard one of them was marrying the daimyo’s daughter,” Tenten comments through a mouth full of noodles. She sounds bored. “Lot of useless ceremony, if you ask me. Think about how much money goes into the bridal trousseau: all those clothes and face paint and shiny trinkets.” 

“It sounds wonderful,” Lee sighs, eyes tracking the passing hooves of the last grand beast, studying every last delicate stitch in the embossed leather of its saddle. 

“They’re headed towards the inn,” Neji comments, “to start drinking, no doubt.” He says this with a sneer, as if he’s never been so far into his cups that he forgot the ratio of salt to flour in udon dough. 

“Hope they’re hungry,” Tenten sighs. She kisses her teeth and tucks her hands into her kimono sleeves. “We could use the _ryo_.”

* * *

Gaara’s soft-soled sandals hardly make a sound as he passes under the red beams of the _torii_ gates and onto the shrine’s stone footpath. The autumn air is crisp, scented heavily with cedarwood and the smell of dark earth, leaves decaying into loam in the thickets of trees that surround him. He trails his finger along the base of one guardian lion-dog statue - freshly painted white and varnished, sticky under his fingertips. Small wooden placards clack and rice paper streamers hush in the chill breeze through the tree branches. 

The whole rushing village life outside falls away. 

There’s a trickle of running water to his right. He pauses, steadies his breath, dunks the dipper in the water and rinses his hands and mouth in the bracing cold. His fingertips shrivel to numb points, pale blue under his fingernails. He doesn’t want to be here.

Ahead, Gaara hears the brush of straw against stone, a mumbled tune hummed under breath. 

“Hello,” he calls, louder than his voice is generally willing, in case the priest is particularly old or deaf. 

The sweeping slows, stops. 

“Did I just hear someone?” A loud voice, booming, youthful - neither old nor deaf, then. There’s a clatter of footfalls, and the priest’s bowed head comes into view, hair covered by his small black cap. The priest looks up and meets Gaara’s eyes.

Suddenly, everything slows. Time dilates like the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond, stretches like pounded mochi. 

The broom’s handle strikes the ground. The sound of it is muffled. 

Over it, Gaara hears his name whispered, screamed, feels chakra-warmed fire and a thick canvas vest at his back, watches grains of sand and years of life slip through his spread fingers. 

His pulse pounds in his ears.

He gasps for breath, as if he just surfaced from underwater.

“Lee?” he creaks. 

Fat tears roll down Lee’s cheeks. 

“Come inside,” he says, and gestures with a bent hand. 

The worship hall is crowded with relics, but Gaara ignores them all as he shucks his shoes - the image of their sandals, overlapping one another in the entranceway in their haste, burns bright in his mind - and follows the trail of Lee’s robes into the shrine’s main office. 

He slides closed the door behind him and stands pressed against it, hardly breathing. For a long, painful moment, they just stare. Gaara can see the tension of Lee’s breath in the staggered rise and fall of his chest. 

“I am not sure where to start,” Lee says weakly. 

“Make us some tea?”

Lee’s hands trembling on the clay teapot betray his lack of formal training.

Gaara steps up behind him, slips his arms around Lee’s waist. The linen volumes of Lee’s robes crumple to his body; the muscles of his ribs shudder. 

“Let me,” Gaara murmurs in his ear. He takes the pot’s iron handle and draws away. 

His hands set out two cups between them, practiced, smooth. He hardly has to watch the steaming water falling from the spout, staring instead at Lee’s hands: the scars different, but the bones the same. He passes Lee his cup. The enamel grates against the tatami mats. 

Lee takes a long, slow sip. He still holds his cup in both hands the same way, still purses his lips but doesn’t blow away the heat. Gaara’s knees ache to press against his. The rows of woven straw between them seem a bridge too far. 

Lee’s cup empties slowly. Gaara’s sits untouched. 

“What if the gods are giving us a second chance?” Lee whispers over the rim of his teacup.

“I don’t believe in the gods,” Gaara says sharply.

“But you came here to seek their advice, and instead you found me … couldn’t that mean something?” 

The explanation _fits_, in a way little in Gaara’s life ever has, settles into his stomach like the last piece of glass in a mosaic. 

“Will you stay?” Lee asks him. “This time?” 

Gaara closes his eyes. He can’t watch Lee’s face when he gives his answer.

“I can’t,” he hisses, hates himself. “Kankuro- if I don’t marry her, he’ll have to instead. I can’t make him- ” He doesn’t even know if he’s making sense now. 

“I understand,” Lee interrupts him. “He found someone, then? Your brother?”

Gaara stares at the floor. Orange sunset filtered through the rice-paper windows creates blocks of terracotta light on the mats. He watches them stretch and distort through a blur of saltwater. His tea grows cold. Lee quietly lights a lantern wick with a flash of gold. The room warms with the smell of rapeseed oil. He reaches over and sets their teacups aside, takes Gaara’s clenched fist between two gentle hands and strokes his knuckles patiently. 

“He’s so happy,” Gaara chokes, finally. “I’m sorry.” 

"You look different," Lee says. Gaara looks up, searches the lights and darks of Lee’s face. His smile is still so kind. Gaara doesn’t deserve it. 

Gaara brushes a hand against the waxed hair at the side of his head, self-conscious. 

"Not many natural redheads in Japan," he rasps, more a cough than a laugh. "You look just the same.” He leans forward. His hand cups Lee's face, thumb stroking through one thick eyebrow.

“Did you live long, after-?” Lee begins. 

Gaara nods, eyes still drinking in Lee’s face.

“I wrote you letters, stacks of them.” The shape of Lee’s mouth trembles as he speaks. Gaara’s thumb catches the corner of Lee’s lips before it falls back to his lap. “I could never quite get up the courage to send them, but… Did Tenten-?”

Gaara shakes his head before Lee can finish the sentence. His gaze drops back to the space between them, narrower now, but is almost instantly drawn back to Lee, the way a moth chases the light. 

Lee breathes a laugh that doesn’t quite survive past his teeth. 

“Of course she didn’t.” His hat wobbles when he shakes his head ruefully. “She was always too proud by half.”

There’s a long silence where all that can be heard is the wind whistling through the branches of the sakaki trees, low and mournful. The cry of a fox kit separated from its mother breaks the stillness. 

“She’s here, too, you know,” Lee says to the lantern light.

“Your wife,” Gaara replies. It’s not a question. “Again.”

Lee grins. His teeth still flash in the barest hint of light, just like before. His eyes are blacker than the bottomless chasms just off the coast, where female divers vanish into the cold water for interminable minutes and surface with their hands full of pearls. 

“No, no, she was our _miko_. She took care of the shrine, did the ceremonial dances, cooked…”

“Was?” Gaara’s lips are thin, tense. Scared of the sharp edges of loss tearing at Lee’s heart again.

“Well, you know, shrine maidens can’t marry.” Lee plucks at a stray thread on the hem of his white robes. “So she and Neji ran away to live in the village.” 

He looks up at Gaara, his eyebrows canting upwards.

“They’re perfect for each other,” he says. “I don’t think they’ll be coming with us, next time.”

“If there is a next time,” Gaara reminds him. His voice wavers bitterly. 

Lee drops his chin and looks back at the pool of shadows in his lap. The lantern light flickers across his high cheekbones. A moment later, he meets Gaara’s eyes again. 

Gaara wishes he could dive into those eyes and never come up for air.

“And if there isn’t?” Lee says. His voice is quieter than Gaara has ever heard it, so low that Gaara has to strain forward to hear. “A next time, I mean.”

Gaara bites his lip and wishes he was biting Lee’s instead. 

“Take me to bed,” he says, rather than give an answer neither of them want to hear. 

“Of course,” Lee says, hearing the question Gaara didn’t voice. He sweeps open the rice paper door that leads to his quarters. His long sleeve drags across the floor in a hush. 

Lee’s futon is rough and stuffed unevenly with straw, but it fits them both. He keeps apologizing - for the spareness of the room, his fumbling hands - and Gaara shushes him with his lips. 

Afterwards, when they’re curled unevenly around each other like the hooks at the end of a brushstroke, water drips into Gaara’s hair. 

He looks up. The room is dark, but the sliver of moonlight from the high window shows Lee’s eyes are flowing freely with tears. 

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” Lee whispers, when Gaara wipes away the tears and licks them off his thumb. His raw lips sting from the salt. “I want to be awake for every moment that you’re with me.”

“Sleep,” Gaara demands. He pushes Lee’s head down to rest on his chest and breathes in the smell of his sweat on his hair. 

It takes a long time, but eventually Lee sleeps. 

Gaara lies awake the whole night.

“What god is your shrine dedicated to, anyway?” he asks the next morning, over his final cup of tea. There’s a blood-red mark in the center of his chest, left by Lee’s teeth and lips. He can see it between the folds of his vest when he leans forward to refill his cup. 

“_Koujin,_” Lee replies. 

Gaara doesn’t look up at him. Can’t. He keeps staring at the mark on his skin, perfectly round like a seal stamped in wax. “The rough god.”

“The destructive force of fire turned toward the benefit of mankind.”

Gaara chuckles. “Fitting.” Every muscle in his body aches with the strain of not falling towards Lee again. 

“Inside the inner walls of the _honden_, it’s said our sacred object is a fire that never goes out.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know it exists?”

Lee shrugs, gives a watery smile. It’s this image that haunts Gaara’s dreams on the long road to the daimyo’s castle. 

“I don’t. I just believe.”

During the _omiai_ \- his first meeting with his would-be wife - Gaara stares into the near distance, memories of stubbled cheeks and warm lips distracting him. The mark on his chest is fading already. His knees have long gone numb from sitting across the low table from his presumed bride-to-be. 

He can see why the daimyo is eager to marry off shy, awkward Hinata, whose hands shake when she pours tea and whose teeth stutter over simple greetings. Her younger sister Hanabi, her attendant, is much more marriageable, sure to attract an altogether more noble suitor. 

“It will be a fine match,” he reports afterwards. Kankuro’s eyes narrow in suspicion, but he carries the lie forward to the matchmaker nonetheless. 

Days later, Gaara swirls the tea in his cup until it creates a tiny whirlpool, the liquid trapped with nowhere to drain to. He and his future wife aren’t meant to be alone together yet, but Kankuro has never been a particularly diligent chaperone. 

“My sister tells me the merchant girls get to choose their own husbands.” Away from the pressure of judging eyes, Hinata is less diffident, more outspoken. Her pale fingers still twitch on the tabletop, just a shade darker than her white-painted face. “Do you ever wonder what that would be like … being in love?”

Gaara’s reflection swims into stillness on the surface of his teacup. There’s a rolled paper fortune in his sleeve that Lee insisted he take with him. More unnecessary superstition. Its edge presses into the underside of his wrist.

“What does love have to do with marriage?”

“N-nothing, I guess, I just- When I was younger, I- “ Hinata sets her teacup down unevenly. It wobbles three times on the table. 

“Would you rather marry someone else?” The paper fortune slips out of Gaara’s sleeve onto his lap. He looks up at Hinata from under his eyebrows without raising his head. A broken-winged bird struggles in his chest. 

“No- no, he- he died, a long time ago.” A pause. “To be honest, I’d much rather be alone. Like the dowager empress. My own land, my own home. Never having to share my space with anyone not of my choosing.” When she jerks her head to look out the window, light flashes in her golden hairpins. “Is that selfish?”

“Not at all.” 

That, Gaara can give her. She doesn’t need him here to protect her. 

His fingernail breaks the seal on the paper fortune. It unspools across his knee: _sue-kichi_, a blessing that will become apparent in time. He doesn’t read the details. The paper crumples in his fist. 

He takes a deep, shaky breath.

“For the wedding, do you have a preference of officiant?”

* * *

Gaara’s home is the furthest Lee has ever traveled from his village. 

It’s raining - an inauspicious omen. Fat drops of water collide with the rice paper windows and turn them sheer. Behind painted screen doors, in the house’s large central room, the air is cool. A thin breeze trails over the carved wooden transoms, but Lee’s neck is warm in his formal robes. 

The wedding room is decorated lavishly, all by the hand of the daimyo’s wife and her entourage of attendants. Hanging scrolls decorated with cranes and tall vases of bamboo - for longevity and a happy marriage - hang from the walls and stand at either side of the altar. Later, guests will gather, and dancing girls will spin through the room, ringing bells to scare away any demons who may prey on the new bride. 

For now, the room contains only three: Lady Hinata, her face painted pale as her brocaded kimono and her long hair elaborately pinned with gold and ivory combs beneath her white silk headdress. Gaara, stone-faced in his wide-hemmed trousers and dark silk vest, embroidered with the joined crests of his and his bride’s families, staring straight ahead. And Lee, who can’t quite bring himself to meet either of their eyes.

The ceremony is as brief as Lee can manage it. He knows the steps, lets his hands move by rote: the purification of the shrine, the calling of the _kami_, the exchange of the _sake_ cups between the bride and groom’s hands. Lee watches Gaara’s wrists, the shift of his bird-thin bones behind muscles as he pours his wife’s cup of rice wine. He watches Gaara’s lips, the damp remnants of the drink licked away by the dart of his tongue. All throughout, Lee feels Gaara’s eyes upon him, heavy as a millstone. The salt meant to cleanse the altar burns in his nose. 

The _maki-e_ shell-matching box, with its lid of sprinkled gold, is passed from hand to hand. Inside are the decorative shells, elaborately painted, their two halves designed to match perfectly just as the married couple should. Gaara cracks the lid and looks inside; Lee cannot help but crane his neck forward to peer at the contents as well. 

Within, the shells are all mismatched, edges disarrayed and uneven. 

Hinata smiles, blackened teeth behind blood-red lips, the true nature of her expression unreadable. Gaara’s face is a placid mask of indifference. It has always been his eyes that held the secrets to his feelings, simmering with currents of emotion that Lee was once skilled at reading. He cannot bear to try to interpret them now. 

After Lee has stored away the evergreen boughs, his fingers sticky with their sap, Hinata thanks him quietly. Her voice trembles as she excuses herself to change into a lucky red kimono for the reception. As soon as she slides the hall door open, separating the head of its painted crane from its neck, Gaara’s hands are upon Lee’s, clutching. 

Gaara drags him into the back garden, where lush greenery and carved stone lanterns conceal them from the outside world. Lee’s back meets a thin cedar crossbar, Gaara’s mouth on his in an instant. Lee’s hands come to the narrow bones of Gaara’s hips to stabilize him. What else can he do?

Gaara’s teeth are sharp, fingernails digging through the thick fabric of Lee’s formal robes and leaving crescents of hot pain on his shoulders. There’s no romance here, only raw desperation. Lee clenches his eyes shut and wills himself not to cry. 

Gaara’s hands come up to grip the sides of Lee’s face. Those jagged nails score lines down his jaw from ear to chin. Gaara raises up on his tiptoes, presses against Lee like he could climb inside his body and make his home next to Lee’s belly, the seat of his soul. 

Lee goes lightheaded from lack of air. Gaara’s breath smells like longing, like blood and salt and evergreen. 

“Please,” Gaara whispers, when he comes up for air, his lips wet with wine and saltwater, “please.” 

But he never finishes his sentence, and Lee doesn’t know what it is he’s asking for. 

There’s a low scraping noise from inside - the sound of a screen door sliding open. 

Gaara bites Lee’s lip so hard he gasps. 

They pull apart.

“You have to leave,” Gaara breathes, and doesn’t open his eyes, “or I won’t be able to let you go.”

When Lee dashes through the wedding room on his way out, his sleeve catches on a vase of bamboo. It sways to one side, then the other, lacquer singing against wood. 

Then it falls to the floor, and it shatters.

* * *

On their wedding night, after their failed, humiliating coupling, Hinata dons a thin silk yukata. The arch of her long neck glows silver in the moonlight that falls across their marital bed, strands of dark hair slicing the skin of her back. Gaara watches the rise and fall of her shoulder until her breathing slows. 

He rises silently. 

In his study, the wind whistles gently between the cracks in the panels of the wall. The cushion between his knees and the floor is thin, the bones of his shins painful where he sits on them. 

Words have never come easily to Gaara. They come no more easily now. 

The ink of his brush halts and spatters, the characters unbeautiful. He considers, briefly, tearing the poem up and starting again. 

But there is little time. Morning will be here soon, and he intends to be gone by then. 

Gaara hears footsteps in the hall. He raises his head. The door to his study slides open, and Kankuro steps from between the ghost of a shadow. His eyes are mere darkened hollows, his fingers white on the hilt of his sword.

“Are you certain?” he murmurs. 

Gaara bows his head. “A widow cannot be forced to remarry.” On the black lacquered tray in front of him in his own _tanto_ knife, ivory-handled and gleaming wickedly sharp. 

Kankuro steps behind him as he looses his kimono and exposes his stomach. He refuses to let his hand tremble on the knife’s handle, though his fingers are slick with sweat. In his left hand he clutches a wrinkled fortune. 

“Thank you,” he whispers, and raises the knife. 

It hurts more than he thought it would. His fingers and lap go oddly warm. He can no longer feel his legs. 

His hand jerks right, then up. He hopes he hasn’t made a sound; it would be undignified.

Behind him, he hears the metallic whisper as Kankuro unsheathes his sword.

* * *

“He told me you were old friends,” Lady Hinata says in that quiet, wavering voice, standing next to Lee in the funeral hut. 

“We were... ” Lee shakes his head. The body before him looks like nothing more than a body. Cold flesh and quiet veins. Whatever once called that vessel home long gone. “Something like that,” he accedes. 

Gaara’s widow is silent at his side. She doesn’t ask for clarification.

“Did he write a death poem?” Lee asks, voice a whisper. 

Hinata’s head bobs gently. Long hair falls in a curtain to cover her eyes. 

“I couldn’t read it,” she says. “There was blood all over. His brother took it. But he had this-” She holds out the crinkled paper fortune. “- in his hand.” 

Lee searches the tidy characters for meaning and finds nothing. 

Priests aren’t meant to touch the dead. Death is unclean, and to touch a corpse would violate his purity. But Lee sees how Hinata’s hands tremble as she moves to wash the body, so he lays his hand on her arm. 

“Let me do it,” he says. 

From the way her shoulders collapse and shake, he knows she’s grateful. 

He takes his time with the water and cloth, carefully wiping the dried blood from the corners of Gaara’s lips. 

This is the only chance he’ll have, he knows, to mourn him properly. The moment he returns to his village, he’ll return to his duties at the shrine. There will be no time to sit in mourning, until the miasma of death has lifted from his body. How could he even begin to explain that the death of the person he had met just twice in this life had rendered him numb?

With gentle fingers, Lee prises apart Gaara’s stiff digits and folds the fortune in between them. 

On the morning of the burial, Lee wakes up and dresses himself Gaara’s clothing, folding his kimono left over right. Then he walks down to the funeral hut and clothes Gaara’s cold body. He wraps Gaara’s kimono right over left. 

As the _monomasa_, Lee is meant to take the place of the deceased, meant to offer his body as a home for his spirit. If Gaara’s soul has come to inhabit Lee’s body, he doesn’t feel it. Perhaps he has already moved on; perhaps in some other life, there’s someone better than Lee waiting for him. But Gaara’s clothes smell just like him, and Lee breathes in that scent all throughout the procession, the ceremony, and the burial. 

He doesn’t cry, because he has to believe this won’t be the last time. 

At the back of the procession, Lady Hinata’s legs go weak, and her sister has to support her back into the house. Lee isn’t quite sure if it’s an act. 

When he returns to his village, he walks straight to the center of the shrine. The long-unused door of the _honden_ creaks open with a puff of dust. Behind the altar is a scroll of _Koujin_, his flame-wreathed face a mask of judgment, his many arms brandishing his weapons in defense. 

On the front of the altar sits nothing more than a brittle bronze bowl, grown cold and slick with old ash. 

If ever there were an eternal flame within the shrine, it has long since been extinguished.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning this chapter for descriptions of child abuse and neglect, including institutional neglect, and a brief reference to homophobic violence.
> 
> As with the previous chapter, although a lot of research went into this chapter, this is likely not an accurate representation of the reality of institutional childcare in Japan - this is cobbled together from research sources and my own personal experience with the residential care system in the US.

**III.**

_And I’m found too fast, called too fond of flames, and I’m phoning my friends, and I’m shouldering the blame, while you’re picking pebbles out of the drain miles ago. And you’re out singing songs, and I’m down shouting names at the flickerless screen, going fucking insane. Am I losing my cool? Overstating my case? Well, baby, what can I say? _

_You know, I never claimed that I was a stone._

* * *

May is a month of nothingness - too warm for spring and too cool for summer. The cherry blossoms have started to wither, and their brown blooms, shriveled on the ground and crushed underfoot, have the faint perfume of rot. The sun rises not too early and sets not too late. The whole world is crushed under the staggering pressure of its celestial limbo.

“Did you hear we’re getting a new kid today?” Uzumaki-kun prods, leaning over into Uchiha-kun’s space on the couch with his finger extended. The plastic of the cushions squeaks under his uniform pants as he shifts. 

“I don’t care,” is Uchiha’s flat reply. 

“I heard he’s a delinquent. I peeked at Umino-san’s files and it says he got moved here for disciplinary problems.” 

“Who _doesn’t_ get moved here for disciplinary problems?” 

Lee is only half-listening to the exchange, head pillowed on one palm and staring out the window. Outside the common area, there’s a wisteria tree, its branches still heavy with the season’s last purple flowers. He’s heard wisteria are meant to smell like honey. The tree in the yard smells like nothing so much as ammonia. 

“Does that mean he’ll be in our room?”

“Yeah. You’re gonna have to move all your shit off the empty bunk. Iruka already told you you can’t keep it there.”

“Well, where the hell am I supposed to keep it? There’s not enough space anywhere else.” 

Lee sighs listlessly. Their chatter fills his brain and makes it hard to think. 

Not that he has much to think about. Most mornings his thoughts are the perfect, glassy empty of apathy. Here, everything is regimented. Eat what is given to you, clean what they tell you to clean, leave for school at the proscribed time, return to these four cinderblock walls when they say so, sleep when the lights go out. There’s no room for independence. No room for planning or decisions. 

Lee thinks that’s why Uzumaki gets in so many fights, why at least once a week he finds Uchiha in the bathroom plugging tissue in his bloody nose. That desperation for stimulation, for something, anything that makes you _feel_. Even if that feeling is negative. Even if that feeling is pain. 

Lee has homework due in first period. He hasn’t done it. He pretends he doesn’t feel guilty about it, because it’s easier than feeling stupid. 

For the last three years, his classes have covered the same subjects ad nauseam. Lee finds it hard to concentrate on the teacher’s droning voice, harder still to sit rigid in his seat and retain any information. Sometimes when he looks at the pages of his textbooks, the characters fritter and invert themselves. There’s a tree outside his classroom window, too - a sakaki tree. On hot days when the window is cracked, the gentle sweet smell of its cream-white blossoms finds its way across Lee’s desk. It’s something to focus on, when he can’t focus on anything else. 

When he feels brave enough, Lee dodges class. 

Uzumaki and Uchiha spend their skipped periods on the roof, sharing cigarettes behind cupped hands. Lee spends his running endless laps on the school’s track, until his brain goes that perfect, blissful white. 

His homeroom teacher says he should join the track club. He doesn’t know how to explain that the institution wouldn’t be able to spare the staff for weekend meets.

The door to the dayroom creaks open, and the clamor dies down to the hushed whispers and murmurs that mean someone new has entered the room. The heavy footfalls of a staff member come to stop near their little group, khaki pants neatly cuffed over loafers, seams pressed crisp. The staff wear hard-soled shoes even indoors, in case they need to take off running. The residents’ shoes are soft on the bottoms, so they don’t feel tempted to run. 

Lee doesn’t look up, hardly even listens as Umino-san introduces their new roommate with chipper enthusiasm. What’s the point, when he may be gone in just a few short months? Outside, a slow breeze stirs the wisteria blossoms that trail across the ground. 

The first thing Lee truly listens to is their new roommate’s voice. It’s gravelly, rough like he’s been chain-smoking or like he swallowed a throatful of sand.

“Call me Gaara,” he says. 

“Gaara?” Uzumaki says in a sarcastic drawl. “That’s a stupid name.”

“Says the kid whose parents named him after everyone’s least favorite part of a bowl of soup.” Uchiha’s voice is sharp as a pocket knife and just as cruel. 

There’s a screech as Uzumaki’s half of the couch gets pushed back under the force of him jumping to his feet.

“Say that again about my mom! I’ll kick your ass!” 

Uchiha’s knuckles crack when he takes his feet in silence. 

Umino-san steps between them. 

Lee has seen this song and dance before - it’s mostly posturing, hoping someone will intervene to calm them down. In science class one year, Lee watched a documentary about how certain types of male birds will fan their feathers rather than fight for territory, because true fighting is too dangerous, takes too much energy. Most of Uzumaki and Uchiha’s interactions seem based in the same principles. 

Instead, he glances over his folded knees to the back of Gaara’s head. His hair is buzzed almost to the scalp - lice precautions - and when Lee studies the shape of his skull in the early morning light falling through the window, he swears he sees undertones of red dancing in it.

(Lee has always been partial to red hair. When he was younger and more daring, Uzumaki helped him dye his in the locker room sink. It had only lasted until dinner time, when the staff had frog-marched him to the store for a box of black dye, but that had hardly mattered. When he had stared at his reflection in the mirror, it hadn’t looked quite _right_, the shape of it not what his fumbling hands had been grasping for.) 

Gaara-kun’s hands as he pulls out his own chair to sit are thin and fine-boned. His knuckles look brittle; there’s a dark purple bruise blooming across the backs of the ones on his left hand. Lee wonders if that means Gaara fights for real, cutthroat; or if he just squabbles like Uzumaki, all bluster and noise, and just happened to cross the wrong person. 

Lee knows better than to stare at another guy’s hands. He knows, too, that he can never speak the thoughts that dominate his mind late at night aloud, not if he doesn’t want his ass kicked (again, like it had been in middle school when he confessed to handsome Shira-kun in the cafeteria and later found his chin meeting the hard porcelain of the bathroom sink from a sucker punch). But the skin of Gaara’s hands is pale and thin, green veins visible between protruding bones, the jut of his wrist on the armrest sharp and deadly. 

Uzumaki, finally placated, goes to take the seat next to Lee’s with a grumble, no longer willing to share the couch. 

Before he can sit, a foot lashes out and hooks its ankle around the leg of the chair, yanking it away. 

Uzumaki’s ass hits the ground hard. 

The whole dayroom erupts in laughter. 

Under it, Lee hears his new roommate breathe a low, raspy chuckle. 

“Lee-kun,” Umino snaps, voice crisp, “I need you to show Gaara-kun around, help him learn where everything is.” His voice lowers. “Make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.” 

Lee looks up - he likes Umino, really he does, likes his no-nonsense attitude and the way he keeps Uzumaki to heel. “Yes sir,” he recites, and bows his head. 

Gaara gives a little snort through his nose, and Lee cuts his eyes to the right to look at him. 

Their eyes meet, and everything becomes suddenly much too loud. Lee’s head goes crowded with lifetimes long past, lives and deaths and loves and kisses and touches and sobs. Lee’s pulse pounds in his ears. The backs of his eyes grow hot. It’s _Gaara_, again, somehow - the same as before yet utterly different. His posture is less guarded, more open, but also more wild. Something about the way he stands, tensed on the balls of his feet, hangs sharp like a knife’s edge, as if he’s spent years crouched for battle. The mottled grey pits under his eyes are the same, though, speaking to the chronic insomnia two lifetimes must not have been able to shake. 

“Holy shit,” Lee breathes. 

“Language,” Umino scolds him. 

Gaara’s face is a blank mask, even his now-dark eyes hard and impenetrable. He’s staring at Lee intently, a one-sided conversation in a language Lee doesn’t quite understand. Lee had thought he was inexpressive before; he’s unreadable now. 

“I don’t feel well,” Gaara says flatly. “I need to go to the nurse’s office.”

“I’ll show him where it is!” Lee leaps to his feet. “Please come with me, Gaara … -kun.” The honorific tastes awkward in his mouth. 

“No running!” Umino calls after them. 

There’s a storage closet in the third floor hallway, just past the bathrooms. It’s stuffed with brooms and dustpans, and there’s no lightbulb, but there’s just enough space within for two thin bodies to stand, centimeters from one another and sharing breath in the dark. 

Lee pulls Gaara inside and shuts the door. 

“Is it really you?” Gaara whispers, his first words since they left the dayroom. 

Lee finally lets the tears that have been threatening spill down his cheeks. He nods, then realizes Gaara won’t be able to see the gesture. “Yeah,” he murmurs back, “yes.” 

Gaara’s hand finds his cheek and tilts his head. Lee can feel Gaara’s breath on his lips; he smells like bleach and the sour toothpaste they hand out in the Temporary Custody centers while kids wait for placement. 

“We don’t have much time,” Lee whispers. “Umino-san will have already called down to tell them to expect us. He’s very strict.”

Umino Iruka has headed the boys’ dorms for ten years, longer than Lee has been at this particular institution. That’s why everyone likes him - he’s a sign of stability in a world of constant turnover, a support beam during an earthquake. Everything about him is calm and steady; nothing fazes him. But that also means he’s wise to every trick in the book, knows every excuse and hiding place. You can try to pull the wool over Umino-san’s eyes, but his gaze is like a pair of shears. 

They’ll have to wait for third shift, where they break in all the new staff. 

“When they do the second room check tonight, ask to use the bathroom,” Lee whispers into Gaara’s ear. His skin is hot, his shorn hair scratchy on Lee’s cheek. Gaara’s breath is coming in rough little pants; his fingers pinch Lee’s forearms. “I’ll meet you there.” 

He feels Gaara’s nod against his face. Lee kisses him, quickly - each of his soft eyelids, the tip of his nose, a brief press to the thin line of his lips. His thumbs smear the wetness on Gaara’s cheeks. “Follow me out,” he hisses. “I’ll knock if the coast’s clear.” 

Down in the nurse’s office, Senju-san studies their red-rimmed eyes with a scrutinizing glare. 

“You boys haven’t been fighting, have you?”

* * *

The woman working third shift is young - she can’t be much older than the boys who are meant to be her charges - and her face furrows awkwardly when she peeks into their four-bed room. 

The light from the hall cuts sterile across Gaara’s pillow. 

“I need to use the restroom,” he excuses, stretching and sitting up. He doesn’t wait for her permission before he knocks once on the post of their shared bunk bed and slips into the hall past her slack expression, bare feet shuffling on the floor. 

He sits in the farthest toilet cubicle with his feet up on the seat until he hears the bathroom door open. 

Gaara can’t sense chakra anymore, but he swears he’d know Lee’s presence even from across a crowded room. He walks the same as ever - soft footfalls, even and rhythmic, stoic and sure. 

He clears his throat to signal to Lee where he is and waits until he sees the too-short hems of Lee’s pajama pants lingering outside before he unlatches the stall door. 

They fall together like two magnets of opposite poles finally brought into proximity. Lee’s forehead presses into his and those wide, dark eyes search his face, fingers stroking Gaara’s cheeks as if he may not be real. 

Gaara laughs softly, the first time he’s laughed in a long, long while. 

“You’ve changed,” he murmurs to Lee’s lips. “Stealth was never your forte.” 

Lee smiles at him. His smile is sadder now, his teeth not as straight and white as Gaara remembers them: his front teeth slightly protruding, grown too eager in his mouth, mottled from a childhood of well water and fluoride tablets. Something grabs Gaara’s heart in a clawed fist and squeezes.

“I have a lot of new skills now,” Lee says gently.

“Like whispering.”

Lee raises a thick eyebrow, a wry and knowing grin crossing his face. He’s got an edge to him now, something sharp and lethal running under the light of his eyes. Lee has always been too fast for Gaara; now, he utterly outstrips him. Gaara starts breathing manually. 

“Your scar.” Lee’s thumb brushes over the jagged planes of Gaara’s forehead, and Gaara lets his eyes fall shut at the touch. 

“My father threw a vase at my head when I was thirteen. That’s why I got put in care.” 

Lee’s brow furrows. “Rasa, again?” 

Gaara nods and cuts his eyes away, stares at the tiny pattern of beige tile beneath Lee’s bare feet. 

“If your theory is right,” he says slowly, “that miserable bastard will keep coming back forever. He doesn’t know how to love anything.” He hates how brittle his voice sounds when he says it. 

“And your mother?”

Gaara shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

“What about your siblings?” 

Gaara shakes his head. “No, there was nobody. Just me and him.” He takes a deep, shaky breath. Lee’s hands drop to his shoulders and rub tiny circles against the bones. “What about you? Your teammates, your teacher?”

Lee’s head shakes slowly, an eerie mirror of Gaara’s earlier gesture. 

“No,” he parrots flatly, “nobody.” 

Gaara can’t stand the hollowness of Lee’s eyes, the patchy stubble on his cheeks that makes him look very young and very old all at once. He wants to shove Lee’s shoulders back, force him to stand straight, pull his cheeks and lips until that full, beaming smile returns to his lips. 

“How did you end up here?” he asks instead, voice suddenly very loud. The vowels smack the tiles and echo. 

Lee’s jaw drops just slightly, an expression of uncharacteristic shock. It’s the sort of question that’s _never_ asked, the taboo of sticking your bare fingers into someone’s open, bloody wound. Gaara’s fingers find his chin and gentle his mouth shut with a soft _click_. 

Lee’s tongue smacks in his mouth when he starts to speak. His voice falters, the story clearly novel to words. “My father killed my mother - stabbed her to death in front of me when I was five. After the trial, they wanted me to move in with relatives, but nobody would take me.” His hands drop from Gaara’s shoulders and he stares at his palms as if he would find them stained red. “‘Bad blood’,” he says heavily. “What if I turned out just like him?” 

Gaara grabs Lee’s hands and reseats them on his waist. His fingers are still long enough that they can meet at the center of Gaara’s crooked spine. Lee’s eyes flick back up to Gaara’s face; there’s something about him that seems so far away, buried down deep. Gaara wants to jam his arm into the depths and haul it to the surface, shake off that dark water and stare it in the eye. 

“Your relatives thought you would kill someone?” Gaara snorts derisively, and he thinks he sees a flicker of _his_ Lee in the quirk of his lip. “You wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

The flicker of light turns to ash. 

“I have before,” Lee says, and his lips hardly move. 

Gaara presses their foreheads back together, hard enough that Lee should feel the imprint of his scar at his hairline. 

“That was different circumstances. Another life.” 

Lee’s eyelashes are so long that they brush against Gaara’s when he blinks - a butterfly kiss. “You’d be surprised what _circumstances_ have come up in this life.” He bites his lip. “I miss my parents - both of them. There’s a loose floorboard under the bottom bunk … I have their wedding picture in a little shrine there.”

“Shinto, huh?” 

Lee’s shoulders jump, the shadow of a chuckle. 

“Old habits die hard. The salt packets from the cafeteria don’t feel quite the same, though.” 

From the hallway, the beam of a flashlight passes under the door. Lee doesn’t seem to notice, but Gaara leans back. 

“How often do they do room checks?”

“Every two hours.” Lee leans to the right, listening intently. His lips draw down into a pout. “They should just be finishing up the little kids’ hall. We don’t have much time.” 

Gaara’s fingers twitch in Lee’s hair, still fine as silk beneath his hands. 

“_Time_,” he spits. “It’s always time.” His hand strays to the collar of Lee’s pajama top. His clavicle is thin where it was once muscled, shadowy even under the blue of the fluorescent lights. “How much longer have you got left?”

This, at least, is a familiar question. The first one everyone asks each new child when they meet. Lee’s hands move and take Gaara’s between them. He squeezes his fingers tight. He won’t meet Gaara’s eyes. 

“Less than a year. In March, when I graduate, they’ll put me on a train back to Chiba and … I guess I’ll find a job.” He sighs. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.” 

Gaara’s forehead wrinkles. “Why Chiba?”

“That’s where I’m from.” That explains his low, smooth accent. “They only moved me here because they were scared if my dad got out he might come after me.” 

“And once you graduate, they don’t think that’s a risk?”

“It won’t be their problem anymore.” Lee shrugs with one shoulder. It looks odd; his motions have always been so even and symmetrical. “What about you?” 

“A little over two years.”

“Two _years,_” Lee hisses. His breath hitches. “I’ve already waited two lifetimes for you.” He drops Gaara’s hands, clutches his face, kisses him hard. Gaara has watched Lee throw himself off mountaintops, but this is the most impulsive thing he’s ever seen him do. Desperation is like a current rushing through both their veins. “I don’t want to wait two more years.” 

There are footsteps coming up the corridor. 

“You go first,” Lee urges. “I’ll come after she moves on to the next hall.” 

Gaara slips out the door and directly into the path of the third-shift staff woman and her flashlight. Her lips purse, her face uplit by reflected light and making her look haunted, upper lip and eye sockets in shadow like a defleshed skull. 

“Stomach ache,” Gaara lies.

* * *

On the train to school, Lee leans his head against the plexiglass window and lets his skull vibrate to a comforting hum of white noise. Last night, someone in the under-tens dorm kept having nightmares, and the screaming kept him up half the night. 

He can sympathise, but that doesn’t make him any less exhausted. Frustration simmers low in his belly. It’s hard to generate empathy on three hours of restless sleep. 

At least Gaara’s next to him, their pinkies a hair’s breadth away on the patterned seat. It’s hard not to touch casually in front of the others, not to sling his arm around Gaara and squeeze him tight or press a kiss to the crown of his head. It’s easy to forget that, as far as everyone else is concerned, they’ve only known each other a week. 

But Uzumaki and Uchiha are sitting four rows ahead, deliberately on opposite sides of the aisle with a string of bodies between them, glaring at each other like their whole world exists only in the tense line between their pupils, so Lee dares to shift his finger that last quarter centimeter until his skin touches Gaara’s. 

Gaara hooks his pinky over Lee’s and squeezes. 

Lee is assigned to sweep and mop the classroom that afternoon, which leaves him the last person in room 3-B after all his classmates have shuffled on their way. 

Spring has the sun still high in the sky by the end of the school day, and the classroom is bathed bright gold as Lee pushes the last of the desks back into place, wiping sweat from his forehead onto the dust kerchief covering his hair.

Behind him, the classroom door slides open. 

“Lee,” comes that low, placid voice. 

He turns and sees Gaara, his uniform jacket and tie thrown over one thin arm, the top button of his collar undone. Even under the school’s white fluorescents, which bring out the dark circles under his sleepless eyes, he looks beautiful. 

“Gaara,” Lee says, and cherishes the feeling of that name being in his mouth again. “Don’t you have cleaning to do?”

“I finished it,” Gaara says softly, and steps into the room. The door shutters behind him. As Lee stows away the mop and bucket in the cleaning closet, Gaara drags a chair against the door for privacy. Then he sits backwards on one of the desks in the front of the room, feet dangling into the seat of the chair. 

“We just wiped those down,” Lee reminds him. 

Gaara ignores him. He taps an uneven tattoo on his knee, studying Lee’s face with an inscrutable expression. 

“I want to run away together,” he says, and his voice is like the whisper of breeze between wisteria branches, “before you graduate.”

Lee can’t pretend he hasn’t thought of it. But they’re both so young, Gaara especially, and so unprepared for the outside world. Lee doesn’t know how to find an apartment or fill out a job application. Hell, he doesn’t even know how to make a grocery list or cook a pot of rice. His mouth feels dry and he finds himself gnawing on the corner of his lip, the raw spot where he channels his anxiety. 

“I don’t know- ” he begins, but Gaara holds up his hand. His motions are so decisive, quick to start and stop, fluid in the middle. Everything about him is edged in a ragged grace. 

“You said it yourself. _Two lifetimes_ we’ve wasted - _I’ve_ wasted, because I couldn’t put us first. There’s nothing holding me here, no one to protect but myself.” Gaara takes a low, shuddering breath. “And now you.”

“It’s dangerous- ” 

“It will be more dangerous for you to go alone,” Gaara snaps. “Say you return to Chiba, what then? Two years from now, how will I find you? Do I just keep an eye on the newspapers for your obituary, in case I need to come find your grave?” 

Lee groans, head sinking into his hands, “I can’t ask you to do this. You’ve got so much more potential than me, you should be - I don’t know - going to university, or … ”

“You’re not asking- “ Gaara’s voice starts to fray, crackling with the edge of panic. “- and there’s not a university out there that would take me.” 

“But you’re a genius!” 

Gaara scoffs. “That doesn’t mean much.” He tilts his head to the side, a queer, considering gesture. On his neck, Lee notices for the first time the dark pink pockmark of a scar. “Not with a history like mine.” 

“But I don’t know how- how to get a guarantor for an apartment, or dress for a job interview, or do _anything_!” Lee protests. “I don’t even own a good pair of shoes.” 

“But you know how to work hard,” Gaara says with finality. He stands, and removes the kerchief from Lee’s hair. He folds it without looking, staring Lee straight in the eye, and presses it into his closed hands. “And I know how to fight.” 

Lee’s lips thin, but he nods, and bows his head so Gaara can kiss him between the eyes.

“So do I.”

* * *

The planning takes longer than they hoped, but over time, everything starts to fall together. They hoard the pocket money designated for outings; Gaara gains a reputation for sickliness, and Lee always volunteers to stay behind with him. They spend their lunchtimes in their high school library, heads linked together by a single pair of earbuds, watching videos on how to prepare meals and how to present for an interview, printing transit maps and jotting the phone numbers of guarantor agencies. A small pile of nonperishable, individually wrapped cookies and bags of crackers secreted from their dinner trays starts to grow under the shared desk in their room. Linens and pillowcases go mysteriously missing on laundry day, and the nighttime staff complain that the dryer has been eating more socks than usual. 

Gaara resists his baser impulses, and his knuckles remain unbruised. After five placements in two years, he won’t risk fighting and being moved again. 

After New Year’s, Lee offers Naruto the cash in his cartoon-character-patterned envelope in exchange for stealing their documents from Umino-san’s office in his awkward, pushy way. Gaara should have been the one to do it, probably - he’s the one who’s forged a cautious friendship with their roommates, while Lee has remained on their outskirts, only extending tentative feelers of emotion when he can justify it in the construct of their _plan_. Lee still calls them by their last names, even now. 

Naruto laughs Lee off and punches him hard in the shoulder. 

“You’re running off?” he asks. “I’ll do it for free. We could use the excitement around here.” 

From his top bunk, Sasuke snorts and throws a pillow to the floor. 

“What?” Naruto challenges. “You gonna duck out with ‘em? How many times’ve they brought you back now? Three? Four?”

Sasuke rolls his eyes and pulls his sheet up over his face. 

“Good luck,” Naruto says, and grins, showing the chip in his front teeth. “Lemme know if ya need help with anything else.”

That’s how Naruto and Sasuke become their accomplices. 

Gaara follows Lee everywhere - on the brief walk to and from the train, in the narrow corridors in the evenings, back and forth to weekend groups - scared of losing sight of him. They share the same rickety table in the cafeteria every morning, Lee’s chair with one leg shorter than the other three and Gaara’s section of the table with some former resident’s initials carved in it. Lee drinks Gaara’s miso soup, which he hates, and Gaara commandeers Lee’s _chawanmushi_. Lee proclaims it’s wrong to dislike food, but the wrinkle in his lip when he swallows it back tells Gaara he can’t really stand it. Every evening they study, elbows bumping, on the same couch, the one with the torn middle cushion whose stuffing has started to fall out. When Lee has tutoring sessions, Gaara waits for him outside the classroom, stiff as a statue, his back making wrinkles on the children’s drawings pinned along the wall.. When Gaara goes to therapy, Lee walks him to the psychologist’s office and sits in the stiff plastic chair in the hall until he’s ready to leave. 

Slowly, that familiar fire starts to burn anew in Lee’s dark eyes. On the nights they sneak to the bathroom to exchange fervent whispers, Lee’s voice sparks with eager joy. It’s contagious, and Gaara finds himself baring his teeth in return. 

Never one without the other; _Lee and his shadow_, everyone calls them, even the staff. Gaara doesn’t mind. Of all the things he’s ever shadowed, Lee is his favorite. 

Gaara proves them right one cold morning in February. 

The elder boys are assigned to clean the grounds, sharp sticks and thick black plastic trash bags clutched in gloved hands. He and Lee exchange glances over the thin woolen scarves wrapped around their faces. Their backpacks, heavier than normal, are tucked under a tree, slowly growing frigid in the winter air, straps tangled. Ostensibly they’re to be grabbed on their way to school, so they don’t need to change shoes and run inside. 

Lee stabs pieces of trash with his typical fervor, aluminum cans buckling loud under the force of his jabs. Gaara follows him methodically, gauging the location of the staff member watching them as he bends and pretends to pick up a gum wrapper. 

Across the yard, Naruto gives a yell and tackles Sasuke to the ground. The staff member whirls around and starts jogging for them, blowing her whistle to summon the other caretakers. 

Gaara meets Lee’s eye. For the first time in this lifetime, Lee’s smile is wide and true, the fire behind his eyes ablaze. Gaara’s heart thuds in his throat and chokes him. 

Hand joins gloved hand. They grab their bags and run, Lee leading and Gaara following. 

They leave their poles behind them on the ground, crossed over each other.

* * *

They find a shitty _doya_, the kind of place that doesn’t ask for ID and lets you pay by the night. 

“You’re young,” says the man at the front desk, concern wrinkling his salt-and-pepper brow. But money is money, so he takes their fake names and their _yen_ and passes them a key. 

The room is just three tatami mats wide, enough room for a single futon unrolled across it. The heater, when it kicks on, smells faintly of mildew. 

The lack of other bodies in the room strikes Lee as strange; he feels he almost has too much space, his ears seeking the sound of Gaara’s breaths and grateful when the person one thin wall over starts to snore. He throws his arm over Gaara’s narrow waist an inhales the chemical smell of his shampoo on his neck. 

They’re too tired to do more than kiss, lips soft and gentle, exchanging breaths of _it’s all right_ and _I’m here now_. The overhead light flickers. Through the walls, someone else starts to cough, sharp and phlegmy.

Gaara strokes the side of Lee’s face and sighs, his eyes speaking comfort. Their knees interlace beneath their stolen sheet. 

Tomorrow, they will wake up and have to go looking for jobs. They will need to figure out what they’ll eat and where they’ll sleep. They will have to dodge the police and operate under false identities, at least for a little while. 

But tonight, they have each other. And for tonight, that’s enough.


End file.
